


Dead Boys Club

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Drugs, Existential Wangst, Implied Overdose, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 01:04:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8124589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: Prokopenko sees the ghost the first night he returns to his room after his resurrection, seven days after his death, when he finally feels like he can exist outside of Kavinsky’s direct line of sight.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This sure is whatever it is.
> 
> A billion thanks to [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) for beta reading and supporting me, she is wonderful and loving and I am so lucky to have her.

Everyone knows that Aglionby is haunted. The professors spread the stories with fond condescension, tales of an old founder or a misplaced caretaker, benignly dead, and the students echo it every time the wind blows a door closed. It’s a game to share stories of cold spots, the prickling feeling of being watched, a shiver of inaudible laughter following a joke that wasn’t really very funny. The ghost is blamed for power outages and gusts that rattle the windows, and no one in the entire school believes it is the least bit real.

And then Prokopenko comes back, fresh enough for his ink to run, and finds the ghost is about as real as he is. Its name is Noah. They have one thing in common.

Until two years ago, Prokopenko’s dorm room was called ‘Cocksure’, until the administration caught on to the source of the snickering. It is currently labelled ‘Hardihood’, as though that’s an improvement, and his door gets vandalised more than any other on his floor. Prokopenko’s roommate is an athlete, and the only proof he has that they still share a room is a constant rotation of dirty gear. One half of the space is four kinds of muddy shoes, shorts, gleaming team photos and enough medals that they don’t all need to be hung up. Prokopenko’s half is unwashed clothes, abandoned books and CDs, posters that fell off the wall months ago that he never bothered putting back up.

He lives there essentially alone, and the empty space crowds him terribly; Prokopenko is a pack animal, alive in someone else’s shadow, faded to nothing on his own. He prefers to spend his nights sprawled out over four other boys, in someone else’s house or car, sifting through the ashes of a party they just didn’t leave. The dorm room is still and quiet, somewhere to change clothes, not the home he was promised it would be.

Noah always haunts Athlete Roommate’s side of the room, and at first Prokopenko thinks that’s just because it’s empty. It’s a disquieting realisation, when it comes, that Noah has been in the room much longer than Prokopenko has. Noah has to show him the name carved into a corner of the headboard in bold, rough letters, each jagged character now overflowing with the bitter expectation that he’d move on and someone else would have to find it on their own.

 

Prokopenko sees him the first night he returns to his room after his resurrection, seven days after his death, when he finally feels like he can exist outside of Kavinsky’s direct line of sight. The ghost is as ethereal as the stories promised, hunched on his absent roommate’s bed across the room, staring at the sheets. He’s there past midnight, when Proko wakes up at a howl of wind; he remains there after Proko blinks slowly, hoping for his eyes to clear. He doesn’t move when Prokopenko eases himself out of bed and out the door, but he’s gone by the time Skov and Swan are ushered in, the fluorescent bulb revealing the room to be as dully un-haunted as it always is.

“Told you,” Swan says, “You’re being fucking stupid.”

Skov’s cartoon-print boxer shorts are the antithesis of the supernatural. “Did K give you something weird again?” he asks. Prokopenko considers everything he’s taken that night, and shakes his head. “Do you think you’re seeing ghosts because you’re –  y’know…?”

His friends had all seen it; as soon as Proko was back he could tell by their eyes, cagey and hesitant, that they watched the breath rattle out of him. Skov and Swan and Jiang hung back for the first week after, like they were waiting for his seams to show, his hems to fray, his heart to burst a second time. Their fear made Prokopenko expect it too, and his first week was sleepless, breath held over every arrhythmic flicker, feeling so fragile and transient. No one else has ever had to confront their mortality like he has; no one else has ever been so chokingly aware of how easy it is for a body to break. 

But Kavinsky is proud of his work as a forger; Prokopenko is on-model in branded colours, no broken English to give him away as counterfeit. The pack closed back in around him, acceptance easing the worst of death back off his shoulders. If he notices anything off about himself, he doesn’t share it. If he is seeing ghosts because he’s dead himself, he is going to keep his mouth shut about it. The wary look in Skov’s eyes is bad enough.

“I don’t think so?” he says, trying to sound as deferential as he does for Kavinsky. “I probably just freaked out a bit.”

Swan looks all the more irritated at having been dragged out of bed for this; Skov claps Proko sympathetically on the shoulder. “Then just sober up and get some sleep.”

They leave. The ghost doesn’t return, though Proko can’t get back to sleep. His overtired mind keeps showing him gleaming flickers of the supernatural, dredging movement out of shadows whenever his gaze loses focus. There are plenty of things in his medicine cabinet that can come with a side of hallucinations, but what he’d seen felt different, not chemically induced. More likely it was a one-off phantasm, conjured by the power of suggestion, seven days spent studying his soul, and sheer exhaustion. 

 

Prokopenko’s problems with sleep started when he was born from it. Kavinsky, who lives half in dreams, left a hole in his head – or maybe that kind of subconscious just isn’t something that can be copied. Proko’s body seems to shy away from unconsciousness, all the lovingly oiled gears grinding on even as his mind begs them to quiet. He can manage it sometimes, if he lies still for long enough, but he prefers the kind of pills that drag him deep enough to spare him from dreaming.

Dreaming is like standing in a hurricane. There’s no rest behind his eyes, just a wreck of missing sensation, the universe screaming out that he is in an invalid state, a null error, bad data, dreamstate missing. Prokopenko loses hours to a torrential whirl of thoughts and whispers and all the crawling little voices that Kavinsky left him with, until his head spits him back out, aching and exhausted and numbingly awake.

Prokopenko tells Kavinsky about the ghost, just like he told Kavinsky about his turbulent sleep and the beat of his heart, overcompensatingly steady. He says, “There’s a ghost in my dorm room,” and, “It looks about our age,” and, “It’s really fucking spooky, K. I think it’s real.”

Kavinsky listens to this, hooded gaze heavy, watching Proko’s lips form the sounds. He’s got one hand wrapped around the back of Proko’s neck, and one hand holding his cigarette, and he takes a long drag before he answers, like he’s about to come out with something considered. He says, “Shit, Proko, you don’t need to be scared of magic. You’re fucking made of it.”

He kisses Proko’s neck after, hungry teeth on unmarked skin, but there’s a distracted feel to the shift of his hands that they both have to pretend to ignore.

Kavinsky’s intent might have been to reassure, but Proko can’t help but be afraid that the magic holding up his bones is not his own. It’s not that he understood his circulatory systems before, it’s that the arcane puppetry now powering him feels so much further from his control. Though, he hadn’t had control of his body in the end, either.

Later, Prokopenko relays all of this to Noah, the only other person he knows kept upright via outside powers. Noah makes much less of a show of listening, leaning into Proko’s side and staring determinedly blank out the window at the nothing of the night, and he speaks only when nudged into speaking.

“You’re not as dead as I am,” he says, voice sounding further from his body than it should. “And you’re not as alive as I was. Is this where you want to be?”

The answer is _no_ , and _should never have died in the first place_ and _yes_ and _at least I’m still here_ and it all gets sifted out to the best of a bad situation, which is what Noah has had for seven years and that Prokopenko can hope to suffer half as well.

There’s a polite truce between them, one topic off-limits, a question they’d both like to ask but wouldn’t like to answer. Noah doesn’t point out the way Proko leaves a hand over his chest, measuring the rhythm, doesn’t say _I know you broke_ or _who glued you back together?_ In exchange, Proko keeps his mouth shut about the most obvious thing, even when his gaze sinks into the hole of Noah’s shattered cheek, even when Noah grins and Proko can hear the shards of bone grinding together, displaced throughout his face.

 

The second time Prokopenko wakes up and Noah is there, he was halfway through his absence-of-a-nightmare, and the ghost is not as frightening as the backs of his eyelids. Noah is running hands over Athlete Roommate’s things, eyes black mirrors to the moonlight shine of the medals. Prokopenko watches as Noah very precisely shoves every trophy all a quarter-inch askew. It’s a tangible effect, a provable interaction, and Noah seems reassured that he can.

He’s less hollow that night, more of a boy, his rumpled Aglionby uniform almost letting him belong. When he’s finished with the trophies, he turns, and a childlike guilt sweeps his face when he sees he’d been watched. It is the least spooky expression Prokopenko can imagine, and it’s what gives him courage to ask, “Are you a ghost?”

Instead of answering, Noah chooses to sputter out of existence.

Proko spends the rest of the night on the floor of Swan and Skov’s room.

There is only a narrow slice of carpet between Aglionby dorm beds, and Skov and Swan clutter theirs with sports bags and shoes and every other possession they’d decided to take to school with them and turned out not to need. Prokopenko doesn’t mind lying crowded between their things, and he doesn’t mind staying on the floor even after Skov steps over him to join Swan and a bed opens up. The point is company; the point is no ghosts.

 _Ghosts_ are a very strange concept when Prokopenko already considers himself dead. He wonders if he would have been one, if this version of him hadn’t come back to fill the gap instead. He’s not afraid of the ghost in the room, but he’s afraid of the reminder that comes with it. He’s afraid that he and the ghost could get on very well.  

He takes more of the pills Kavinsky made ‘just for him’, stops for a week, then goes back to two at night and a handful whenever he feels overwhelmed, which is every single night he spends alone. He’s scared to die again. He’s not sure it matters. His head feels weaker to Kavinsky than it ever was before, but this new heart beats so steady, Proko’s not sure it can break.

Skov and Swan tell him to stop sleeping on their floor because they’re sick of fucking in front of him without him joining in; Jiang’s roommate tolerates him for one night only, and then demands he clear out. Kavinsky’s arms are open to him, always, along with his house and his car and the rest of him, the body Proko fits so well against and the mind he was born from. But lately Kavinsky’s eyes have been on Ronan Lynch, or someplace further ahead, coloured with a weird, sick sadness that Prokopenko can’t follow. Some nights, Proko makes an effort. Other nights, Kavinsky wants to rot from the inside out and Prokopenko loves him too much to be allowed anywhere near him.

He goes back to his room, and lies on his bed, hating the dark and the isolation and the thudding of his chest, and the next time he sees the ghost, he is desperate for it to stay. Prokopenko is a pack animal; even a shadow’s shadow is better than nothing.  

 

Noah shows up mostly when its dark, mostly in storms, mostly huddled on a bed with his knees pressed up to his chest. His eyes are flecks of space, reflecting the void, and he looks at absolutely nothing as his chest caves in with a single breath it never exhales. But he’s something like company, and he saves Proko from falling down the holes inside himself, and that is absolutely good enough. At worst, Noah is a silent apparition; at best, he helps to fill in some of the gaps Kavinsky left.

Proko still has difficulty with the way his friends look at him sometimes, with the way Kavinsky looks at him, and they weren’t equals before but now the power divide is one that shouldn’t exist between two people. Creator and creation. Everything he was before is lesser; Kavinsky rewrote his identity. His death is absolutely the defining thing in his interactions with Noah, but it’s also the only place he feels even a fraction understood.

Their relationship is soft touches, is letting Noah steal all the warmth from Proko’s skin, is reassurance that they’re both still real. It’s lying together on a too-narrow dorm bed when sleep is a horror, fingers linked, only one of them breathing. It’s a mouthful of the past that neither wants to spit out or swallow, a way to cope with the empty present, a dim view of the future. It’s cold nights and an answer to the lonely, transient feeling scarred into their souls.

Proko falls asleep with Noah’s icy nose pressed into the back of his neck, and wakes alone. At some point while he slept, the lacrosse racquet in the corner was swapped out for a muddy soccer ball. His phone has seven unread texts, all from Kavinsky, sent at five thirty in the morning. They’re barely coherent, but Proko can read two: ‘ _i knew what those pills would do’,_ and ‘ _i wanted to see if i could and i could’_. 

Proko puts his phone down. He knew already, he thinks, but knowing is different to _knowing_ , to seeing the truth in a pre-dawn confession. An Aglionby dorm building is not a quiet place, but even as the music starts up down the hall, even as students holler to each other right below his window, the room feels packed with cotton wool, insulated and so, so distant.

 

“Ronan told me about Kavinsky,” Noah tells him once, when he’s in a mood to talk.

It’s one of the stranger things Proko has heard Noah say. “You know Lynch?” It’s hard to imagine him as anything other than an Aglionby ghost, hard to imagine knife-sharp, cruel-eyed Lynch finding time for a creature as softly faded as Noah.

“I know him,” Noah says, and then his focus drifts away. Proko waits him out, because conversations held at two in the morning pace themselves, words fitted in between the lulls that the night leaves for them. He has suspected that Noah goes to places other than the dorm room, and this confirms it; Proko wonders if Noah is more in other places, or less. “Kavinsky,” Noah says after a minute, returning. “You’re his.”

“How do you mean?” Proko asks, meaning _which way in particular_ because he may as well have a _K_ tattooed on the back of his neck at this point. He might actually get the tattoo; Kavinsky would like it.

There is a pause so long Prokopenko thinks Noah is done with talking, and curls in closer, breathing in the mossy, misty scent that clings to the wrinkles of Noah’s sweater. He lies behind Noah, with his mouth by the ghost’s ear so that his warm breath can sweep over him the way Noah likes. Proko didn’t sleep the night before, so this seems like a likely night for it, the world already swimming in the corners. He’s halfway gone before he hears the rustle of Noah’s words, quiet enough to hide.

“You’re his like I’m _his_ ,” Noah says, and Proko knows he doesn’t mean Kavinsky, he means whoever used to sleep on Prokopenko’s side of the room, in the bed Noah refuses to lie in. There are too many ghosts cluttered in one room.

Prokopenko asks, “Who was he?” and feels Noah crush up against him, trembling, collapsing into a sigh.

“He was my best friend,” Noah says, with seven years scraping along the roof of his mouth. “We were close. We were so close. I never thought he could.”

 _Not close like Kavinsky and I are close_ , Proko thinks, and then he thinks of the sallow distance in Kavinsky’s eyes and the drugs that are never quite enough anymore, and he has to swallow sickness back down to his stomach. The thought of dreaming is nauseating. Noah’s icy hands latch around his, and Proko rubs his thumb over all the scabs on Noah’s knuckles that aren’t ever going to heal.

 

Proko’s memory of his death is a fractured thing.

He has been told how it happened, so he knows parts with the distance of an outsider; how late it was, the shape of the pills he took, the fact of his heart stopping. The party dissolving with his death. The three long hours where Skov and Swan and Jiang had to come to terms with it, and how they loathed Kavinsky for leaving them with the corpse. And then, of course, Kavinsky coming back, Prokopenko at his side.

Proko remembers none of that. His own memories have lost all context and hold just the suffocating, seizing horror of his last moments, an impression burned into him too strongly to not follow him through death and back into this body. It was the first thing he felt, his new throat burning, his new lungs collapsing, the bloody supernova unfolding in his chest, until Kavinsky slapped him in the face and told him he was fine.

And Prokopenko is fine. He may remember the frothing terror of feeling his own heart rupture, but the new one beats steady as a metronome. His friends took him back when he showed he wasn’t different, as though liking the same music proved death hadn’t changed him, and he lies on their beds and talks the same shit and keeps his mouth shut about the chasm in him, and everything is good.

There are only two things Proko has really, truly lost. One is what’s obvious; the other is Kavinsky. The scales between them have been irrevocably tipped, the shift from friend to leader to lover to god finally complete, and if Kavinsky ruined Prokopenko’s life, he detonated his own. He wanted to see if he could, and he could, and now Kavinsky has finally ascended as high as he can possibly go. Proko still loves him, but Proko is no match for the tar pit in Kavinsky’s chest that eats at him so greedily.

 

“I think this is the worst place for me to be,” Noah says, when Proko asks him why he’s lingering. “I think this is where I am the least. But it’s where we lived together; it’s where _we_ were. I want to understand.”

Proko could say _I don’t think you’re going to get an answer_ , but there’s no use being cruel to the dead, so he asks, “Where do you go, when you’re not here?”

“To my friends,” Noah replies. “Or, nowhere.”

“I think I’ve been nowhere too,” Proko says, and Noah nods, and neither of them bother to ask if it’s the same black place that swallows them both. All voids are equal. Noah’s cold fingers curl around the back of Proko’s neck, and Proko shuts his eyes so he won’t see the broken pit of Noah’s cheek, so he can believe they’re both just boys.

They lie chest to chest and share the beat of one heart between them.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really sad that this is called 'Dead Boy's Club' and I couldn't shoehorn Gansey in, he'd be Club President. 
> 
> Thanks to anyone who was up for reading a Noah/Proko fic!! :V I'd love to know what you thought, here or through [the obligatory tumblr link](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/)


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